[olifante]

Putting the burden on invididuals for averting the climate crisis is a form victim-blaming. It’s long been clear that only concerted collective action will be effective in producing real change.

This is why so many free-market, minimal-state absolutists are so prone to putting their fingers in their ears and pretending climate change is not a problem, or if it is, that individuals as free agents are responsible for creating it and therefore fixing it. They cannot accept the logical conclusion of the necessity of state action, as it contradicts their core beliefs.

[Aerbil313]

Not acknowledging that the current predicament is caused by every single human being except maybe native tribes in remote islands is blindness. Saying that the vast majority (%99.9) of human beings is responsible and to be blamed for it is not victim-blaming, but not right either. The thing to blame is our beloved technology. Technology is the main force which shapes human society. We do things and don't do things because of our technology. It defines societies and the entire human civilization. The only choice there was was to oppose all technological progress, but that ship has sailed long ago, in 15th century or so. Back then, few people understood what technological progress will inevitably bring, no one had a time machine to see 21th and 22th centuries. We tout these people as religious backward luddites today, though the sentiment is changing.

The whole situation is as deterministic as two celestal bodies moving according to Newtonian physics. Technological progress was inevitable, and so was the resulting population bomb in the last century, and so is the nearing Collapse of the civilization in the coming decades, due to ecological overshoot. Read the Industrial Society and Its Future by Ted Kaczynski.

[Fricken]

For even longer it's been clear that any collective (or state for that matter) is made up entirely of individuals. In this case millions of individuals who can't help but give tens of thousands of dollars to the fossil fuel industry each year. I'm really not apt to regard a bunch of people enjoying the fruits of their ill-gotten gains as victims.